Loughner's supremacists tie debunked

An Arizona law enforcement agency is backing away from a document it produced in the aftermath of Saturday’s shootings in Tucson – and which was leaked to Fox News – that linked the man accused with carrying out the crimes to a white nationalist publication.

After Fox News began citing the document in its broadcasts, initially describing it as a memo from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the story was picked up by other media, which suggested that the federal government was looking at the role of the publication, American Renaissance, in motivating the shootings.

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David Denlinger, commander of the Arizona Counter Terrorism Information Center acknowledged that the document came from his agency, but contained errors and overstated the link between Jared Loughner, the 22-year-old charged with shooting Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others outside a Tucson supermarket, and American Renaissance.

“I do have no reason to believe in anything that we did that (Loughner) had any direct connection or was being directed by American Renaissance,” Denlinger, an Arizona state police major, told POLITICO Tuesday.

Denlinger said the document “was never intended for public dissemination. It was also not a police report or even a record that is in our system. It was simply two people that put a quick summary together for their bosses in terms of here are some of the things that are being looked at right now.”

Jared Taylor, American Renaissance’s founder and editor, denied any connection with Loughner when contacted by Fox News reporter James Rosen on Sunday. Rosen read his denial on the air, including an assertion that the document was “complete nonsense. I have absolutely no idea what DHS is talking about.”

In an interview with POLITICO, Taylor, who is also the head of the New Century Foundation, which publishes American Renaissance, blasted Fox for airing reports based on the document before contacting him, suggesting that either the network “swallowed a hoax” or the document’s author “is a complete bonehead who deserves to be fired.”

A spokeswoman for Fox News did not respond to questions about Fox’s reporting on the document, though Rosen, in a Monday on-air segment, reported that subsequent law enforcement memos didn’t mention American Renaissance.

The magazine and the New Century Foundation advocate a strain of white separatism that holds that many of America’s social ills are due to racial diversity, forced integration and waves of minority immigration. However, Mark Potok, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, told POLITICO the group is not anti-Semitic.

Taylor said Monday that since the reports aired, American Renaissance has been receiving a flurry of nasty and threatening email and phone calls. “We’ve been called anti-Semitic, racist murderers,” he said.

Many other media outlets – including POLITICO, the New York Times and the Associated Press – followed Fox, either citing the network or local authorities as sources, and Denlinger said he planned to call Taylor Tuesday to explain how his group was implicated.

The document – which Denlinger described as an email “one of the detectives in the center authored … to his supervisor … just simply mentioning the brainstorming” – asserted that there is “strong suspicion” of a connection between Loughner and American Renaissance.